Monday, March 27, 2017

Prompted to write...

I mentioned before that I was going to use writing prompts on days that I didn't have any ideas about what to write to make sure that I was writing more days than not.

Today was one of those no real ideas but haven't written since Friday so really need to sit down and crank something out sort of days. I thought a little about a political tirade but, honestly, I am so tired right now of all of that. I am tired of watching people make excuses for the inexcusable so I'm skipping that for a moment. But that means looking for a prompt. I decided that there must be some sort of daily writing prompt thing out there. I mean I have daily prompts for my picture of the day so there must be something for writing, right?

I found a ton aimed at teachers to get kids to write. I don't think a story about the great Alaskan earthquake that happened on this date in history is really in my wheelhouse and I don't have access to library resources #1-4 to complete the assignment. I'm not even sure what those are which increases the level of difficulty quite a bit. Then there were these three aimed at adult writers:

Use the following sentences as the opening lines of a short story:
He did not know what to do. They had never had contact with this race before.

Ummm...okay.

How about this one?

If your hero's love interest could invite three famous people to dinner, who would he or she choose?

And then this jewel from a list that is formatted pretty much the same way as my Picture of the Day prompts:

Destroy it.

Unless you write science fiction the first one isn't really going to grab you. And as I don't write science fiction I am ungrabbed (back to political writing? hmmm...) The second one is one of those things that is supposed to help you write your great american novel. It's more a cue to dive deeper in to your characters and flesh them out. Who are they? What are their deep thoughts? Well, I don't have current hero right now I just have my standard stable of characters who when asked questions like that roll their eyes at the very cliched thought of such a thing. "I'd invite Mario Batali, Michael Symon, and Duff Goldman. And not so much to dinner as to make me dinner." And then there is the last one: destroy it. What the fuck does that even mean? That's not a prompt for writing. That's just lazy. Though not as lazy as tomorrow's which is iPhone. THESE ARE NOT PROMPTS! THESE ARE JUST RANDOM WORDS!

So yeah, I need to find a good book of prompts and not rely on the interwebs it seems...